Discourse Units Research Articles

Subjectivity of Discourse Constructions in News Discourse by Integrating Construction Grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract This study aims to explore subjective connotations of different types of discourse constructions in news discourse in a systematic way. An analytical framework of the subjectivity of discourse constructions in news discourse was constructed. The subjectivity of discourse constructions in news discourse was analyzed by integrating Construction Grammar (CG), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and inductive thinking in mathematics. The findings show that: (1) news discourse, a large discourse construction, is the form-feature-function pairs of discourse units in news reports, consisting of title-report constructions and main-content constructions with 20 subtypes and five features; (2) each type of discourse construction explicitly possesses its structures or markers and also reflects speakers’ rich subjective personal marks with five connotations. These findings help understand speakers’ emotions, attitudes, intentions, and ideologies towards objective events in a deeper way, interpret speakers’ embodied experiences and perception of the communicative context, and speakers’ concern over the hearers, thus promoting human communication.

KEYWORDS, SYMBOLIC WORDS, PRECEDENT UNITS IN BRITISH-UKRAINIAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

In this article, the author examines the utilization of “keywords,” “symbolic words,” and “precedent units” in the British-Ukrainian political discourse through an analysis of public speeches by British politician Boris Johnson on the X social network (formerly Twitter). In the context of the russian invasion of Ukraine, the study seeks to elucidate the linguistic aspects of how political narratives and messages shape public opinion. In the contemporary digital era, social media platforms have become influential tools for politicians to interact with their audiences and shape political discourse. Boris Johnson's use of X as a communication platform highlights the significance of analyzing his posts to comprehend the prevailing political topics and issues within the British-Ukrainian political discourse. The author tries to shed light on the prerequisites and causes of the formed political discourse, as well as to establish the cause-and-effect relationships that made the formation of the mentioned linguistic units in the British-Ukrainian political discourse. Boris Johnson's speeches and social media posts address various political subjects, including the Russia-Ukraine war, and the keywords within his communication convey the United Kingdom's stance and support for Ukraine. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamics shaping the British-Ukrainian political discourse and its role in influencing public opinion.

Сочетаемость слова «будущее» как лингвокогнитивный инструмент изучения образной семантики поэтического концепта

The study aims to present various mechanisms of cognitive modelling as a way to detect integrity and stability in the figurative system of poetic language. The paper considers the semantic representation of one element of the figurative-associative level of the FUTURE concept, i.e., the lexeme будущее (the future) in comparison with the element прошлое (the past) of the same conceptual macro-field “Time”. The scientific novelty lies in identifying the general patterns of figurative conceptualization of a poetic reality fragment, i.e., the Future universal. As a result of the study, it was found that the system of figurative paradigms developed on the basis of cognitive metaphors is characterized by stability and reproducibility, serves to store and transmit methods of poetic thinking in linguistic forms. When examining asymmetry of related literary concepts as independent units of literary discourse, collocability becomes an effective tool for identifying the figurative-associative content of the concept. Predicative and non-predicative phrases perform the task of cognitive modelling in different ways. The semantic compatibility of the lexeme representing the concept is stable in poetic language as a secondary semiotic system.

Structuring Japanese editorials along the lines of rhetorical structure annotations: issues and discoveries

This paper is a result of a practical experiment in annotating the rhetorical structure of three editorial articles from the leading Japanese newspapers, focused on connectors and their role in the text. Annotation work was carried out along the general lines of existing techniques, at the same time calling for substantial adjustments in both the relations’ taxonomy and orientation, and also the principles of breaking down discourse units. These methodological findings are reviewed in the conclusive part. The main difficulty in representing the overall text structure is whether it can be convincingly represented in the form of a tree (as is expected from a pragmatically organized text). Some in-depth analysis shows that apart from rhetorical relations between discourse units a complex networks of holistic structure (macrostructure), intentional structure, referential network are of not less importance in the unity of the text. Notional structure in the basis of the reader’s comprehension also comes into the bargain, as well as the author’s efforts to influence and direct it overtly or covertly. An RST tree would only be a part of this totality. Appended are tentative graphical representations of an approximated tree structure as well as graphs covering the text’s intentional structure, divided into interconnected layers. This experiment highlighted major peculiarities of a newspaper editorial as one type of text. They are seen as rooted in the pragmatical nature of this genre of language activity, whose principal aim is opinion leadership and of the audience that is highly heterogenous but at the same time capable of detecting and processing sophisticated logical and rhetorical devices. That imposes some structural conditions besides general structure specialties of the Japanese language.

Context and coordination in discourse

Sentences including their deictic information are elementary discourse units linked in constituent structures. They are bound to information from their discourse contexts, and their linking produces rhetorical effects. Discourse is a sequence of linked sentences bound to their discourse contexts. Each sentence or elementary discourse unit is linked to others by means of the information it requires to be interpreted, obtained from its discourse context and its deictic information. Discourse context is the source for the additional information needed for the linking of discourse units and their interpretation in discourse constituent structures, producing the intended intentional rhetorical effects in texts. Subordination in discourse relations between units is analyzed in terms of their topics and frames. Coordination with sentence-initial and has subordination-to-the-left properties in the discourse constituent structure. These properties of discourse coordination, including focus and wider scope, are shown to be effective tools to build and organize, by means of discourse coordination, complex discourse units that represent rhetorical moves in texts.

Hierarchical graph fusion network and a new argumentative dataset for multiparty dialogue discourse parsing

Discourse parsing in multi-party dialogue aims to extract the relationships between elementary discourse units (EDUs) such as arguments and utterances, and has numerous applications like chatbots or virtual assistants. Two significant challenges have been encountered in previous works: the obstacles in fusing various contexts in the modeling; and the lack of argumentative dialogue datasets in this field. To tackle context fusion challenges in the modeling, we introduce the Hierarchical Graph Fusion Network (HGFN). This method introduces sufficient contexts by hierarchically modeling the dialogue and minimizes context noise through a novel routing mechanism. It specifically: (1) Encodes multiple levels of contexts using hierarchical graph neural networks. During this stage, the router allows information exchange across different levels, expanding the model’s receptive field in dialogue. (2) Fuses matching signals from multiple levels of contexts with a fusion network. Here, the router restricts the information flows to the same context level, efficiently minimizing noise from irrelevant context. Furthermore, despite the significance of argumentative multi-party dialogue in real-world applications, this area remains largely unexplored due to dataset scarcity. To address this challenge, we develop two meticulously annotated datasets, MRDL and MRDR. Unlike the prevailing datasets that primarily focus on short and colloquial conversations, our datasets feature intricate argumentative dialogues and are publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI0Research/MRDL-and-MRDR. Our new datasets and the HGFN model could promote further advancements in this field. Extensive experiments are conducted and it is revealed that the HGFN model surpasses the state-of-the-art, particularly in complex, argumentative dialogues.

Raw data and its implications in exegesis of Daniel 11,2b-12,3

Three kinds of raw data in Daniel 11,2b-12,3 carry crucial implications for interpretation.First, these verses comprise one discourse unit beginning with literal language. Therefore,the entire unit is basically literal. Accordingly, 11,2b-12,3 is the third angelic explanation(with elaboration) of the symbolic vision in 8,3-14, following explanations in 8,17; 19-26and 9,24-27. Second, these three parallel explanations share intratextual terminologicalpoints of contact. So contexts of words in chapters 8 and 9 reappearing in chapter 11illuminate similar contexts in chapter 11. Third, matching language of literary profilesin Daniel 11 to historical events requires accurate identification of raw historical data.Thus, verse 40 does not predict the “mortal wound” of the church of Rome inflicted byatheistic France in A.D. 1798. In verses 40-43, the religious-political church, the “king ofthe north,” defeats the religious-political “king of the south”: Islamic power.

Affect and Characterization in Narrative Texts Written by Senior High School Students

This article discusses the attitudinal lexis representing feelings to support the process of characterization in narrative texts written by senior high school students in Plupuh, Sragen. Six best stories were selected from twenty texts produced by the students to be analyzed for their text structure and for the way the writers exploit the emotive words representing feelings to support the process of characterization for the participants in the stories. The results show that all of the writers have good skills in arranging discourse units to be a narrative text. All of the texts are structured with the obligatory discourse units for a narrative such as Orientiation, Complication, and Resolution. Furthermore, they are also good in selecting the emotive words representing feelings in the forms of Quality and Process. However, they did not have the words in the form of Comment in their stories. The language units representing feelings are distributed along the units of the narrtive texts to support the discourse functions of each unit. Overall, the exploitation of the emotive words can help the writers in the process of characterization of the participants of the stories they produced.

DaGATN: A Type of Machine Reading Comprehension Based on Discourse-Apperceptive Graph Attention Networks

In recent years, with the advancement of natural language processing techniques and the release of models like ChatGPT, how language models understand questions has become a hot topic. In handling complex logical reasoning with pre-trained models, its performance still has room for improvement. Inspired by DAGN, we propose an improved DaGATN (Discourse-apperceptive Graph Attention Networks) model. By constructing a discourse information graph to learn logical clues in the text, we decompose the context, question, and answer into elementary discourse units (EDUs) and connect them with discourse relations to construct a relation graph. The text features are learned through a discourse graph attention network and applied to downstream multiple-choice tasks. Our method was evaluated on the ReClor dataset and achieved an accuracy of 74.3%, surpassing the best-known performance methods utilizing deberta-xlarge-level pre-trained models, and also performed better than ChatGPT (Zero-Shot).

The Conversational Discourse Unit: Identification and Its Role in Conversational Turn-taking Management

This study investigates how discourse segmentation and turn-taking interact. Mapping syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic units, five types of conversational discourse units (CDU) were identified. Based on this segmentation, associations were examined between the syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic boundaries and turn-taking, as well as the transition speed after each type of CDU. Results show: 1) The relationships between the three linguistic boundaries and the occurrence of turn-taking were significant, and the association was the strongest for the pragmatic boundaries; it was weaker for prosodic boundaries and the weakest for the syntactic boundaries. 2) The type of CDU influenced the transition speed, with the pragmatic-syntax-bound CDU being fastest. The study highlights the importance of meaning-connection and earlier emergence of the utterance gist in timing turn-taking.

Трансграничная динамика англоязычного военного дискурса в период специальной военной операции РФ на Украине

The aim of the research is to characterise the transboundary dynamics of the English-language military discourse during Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. The research is carried out involving the material of the publications of leading English-language news agencies devoted to the conduct of the special military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. It is noted that the armed conflict, being a phenomenon covering all spheres of society, affects the language, which is not only the main means of communication for representatives of an ethnic group, but also a weapon that influences and manipulates public consciousness. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first to analyse the impact of the armed conflict taking place today on the lexical structure of the English language. The paper identifies the main trends of changes in the lexical structure of the language during the transition of units of one discourse into the space of mass media discourse. It is the first time that modern mass media are considered as a kind of cross-discursive space in which lexical and phraseological units of the military discourse acquire new shades of meaning, allowing them to act as a weapon of influencing the consciousness of the mass audience. As a result of the research, it has been found that military terminology is being activated in mass media discourse, the semantics of words and phrases are changing, the vocabulary of World War II and the Cold War is being actualised, in addition, lexical and phraseological units of military slang are being introduced into media discourse.

COGNITIVE-PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS

The article discusses the problematic issues of discourse analysis and presents information about the existence of important works and different points of view of foreign linguists, which many researchers should know: students, graduate students, doctoral students, scientists and others. Special attention is paid to the controversial issue of discourse analysis (Diskursanalysis), discussion of definitions, interpretation of text units, models of interactions of certain categories, such as social activity, information competence, etc. The cognitive-psychological approach to discursive analysis is one of the popular presentations of the latest achievements of linguistic science. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the article is to illustrate the methods of discursive-linguistic research aimed at conducting own analysis. In this regard, the work includes key questions, theoretical discussions from the point of view of Germanic, practical and classical examples, scientific concepts, definitions recognized by many researchers, criteria for arranging texts, personal observations. In the article, there was a place for the main concepts and other information that contributed to the disclosure, deepening, and updating of some discourse units. A significant contribution is also the point of view of the authors, bringing special arguments and concepts for understanding and scientificlinguistic application of the discourse. The benefit of various types of research is to create a basis for applied linguistics that goes beyond functional pragmatics. We hope that these or other principles of analysis will help to understand the problems, they will also be prerequisites for the heuristic/search hypothesis, for the development of ideas in the study of language paradigms of related studies.

ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНЫЙ ДИСКУРС В ЭПОХУ ГДР И ФРГ СКВОЗЬ ПРИЗМУ ЯЗЫКА СМИ

The article is devoted to the consideration of linguistic features typical for educational discourse in the GDR and FRG, which are reflected in Neues Deutschland (GDR) and Der Spiegel (FRG). The relevance of the study stems from the fact that differentiated lexical units related to the field of education are difficult to translate in texts from the era of divided Germany. Therefore, formally similar or even identical lexemes used in the educational discourse of the GDR and the FRG have different semantics due to the differences in the political structure of these countries. This constitutes a challenge for contemporary translators who are confronted with texts from that era, which are becoming increasingly accessible due to the lifting of secrecy and the emergence of educational texts’ electronic collections. This study is limited to the study of differentiated lexical units of educational discourse in newspaper articles from the GDR and FRG periods, since it is the mass media that most clearly reflect linguistic trends, recording typical ways of linguistic nomination. The authors trace the changes in the educational environment associated with the change of political and economic system in the GDR, consider the specificity of linguistic units of that time in the educational discourse, analyze unique lexemes in newspaper articles Neues Deutschland and Der Spiegel and offer their translation equivalents.

Features of Functioning of the Erzya-Russian Bilingualism in the Aspect of Code switching

This article is devoted to the study of Erzya-Russian bilingualism in the aspect of code switching on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. The aim of the study is to present the types of intra-phrase code switching based on the material of narrative recordings of Erzya-Russian bilingual children. Special attention is paid to the study of the peculiarities of the functioning of native and non-native languages in a bilingual society, the mechanisms of code switching in children, taking into account the (non-) correspondence of structures in two languages and different strategies of native speakers’ response when using two languages in one unit of discourse. The source base of this study was the materials of the spontaneous narrative collected by the author of the article in 2017-2019. The informants are bilingual children aged 4 to 7 years inclusive. The research methods were the descriptive method of factual material, narrative sampling, included and not included observation.

A Two-Stage Long Text Summarization Method Based on Discourse Structure

This paper proposes a two-stage automatic text summarization method based on discourse structure, aiming to improve the accuracy and coherence of the summary. In the extractive stage, a text encoder divides the long text into elementary discourse units (EDUs). Then a parse tree based on rhetorical structure theory is constructed for the whole discourse while annotating nuclearity information. The nuclearity terminal nodes are selected based on the summary length requirement, and the key EDU sequence is output. The authors use a pointer generator network and a coverage mechanism in the generation stage. The nuclearity information of EDUs is to update the word attention distribution in the pointer generator, which not only accurately reproduces the critical details of the text but also avoids self-repetition. Experiments on the standard text summarization dataset (CNN/DailyMail) show that the ROUGE score of the proposed two-stage model is better than that of the current best baseline model, and the summary achieves corresponding improvements in accuracy and coherence.

Socio-cultural conditions for public political rhetoric in the Italian language of the 19th–21st centuries (lexical aspect)

One of the main structural units of the political discourse of any language is its socio-political vocabulary, which is an integral part of the lexical system of the language reflecting a combination of the political and social characteristics of society. Such a complex of lexical units is designed not only to convey to the audience the views of any politician, but also to affect the society through vibrant and clear speech patterns determined by existing ideological values. The socio-political vocabulary is inevitably transformed following the changes in the domestic and foreign policy of the country. This evolutionary process brings neologisms, some of which are firmly fixed in the language. This article is an attempt to evaluate the influence of the historical context on the evolution of the socio-political vocabulary of the Italian language through the examination of a number of its key features which reflect certain milestones of the country’s development and history. It considers the most vivid and widely used political terms, which are products of the linguistic creativity of statesmen in various periods of Italian history since the emergence of the single state in 1861 to the present day. The paper analyzes the factors that had a direct impact on the formation of these lexical units and the connection between personal characteristics of certain Italian politicians with their choice of terms intended to appeal both to their supporters and opponents. The article describes some aspects of the transformation process of the political language into popular language designed to ensure effective communication with the electorate.

Особенности функционирования англоязычной лексемы “fashion” как доминирующей единицы дискурса моды (на материале русского языкового цифрового пространства сети Интернет)

The aim of the work is to determine the peculiarities of the functioning of the English lexeme “fashion” and its combinations as a dominant unit of fashion discourse in the Russian linguistic digital space of the Internet. The paper considers the functioning of the English lexeme “fashion” and its combinations in the receiving (Russian) language, its multilevel entry, describes the structural characteristics, suggests a thematic description. The scientific novelty of the work lies in taking a comprehensive approach to the study of the peculiarities of the English lexeme “fashion” in the modern Russian language based on the linguistic digital material of the Internet. As a result of the research, 144 English-language borrowed units with the key component “fashion” were detected, 14 thematic subgroups of the English borrowings were identified; such thematic subgroups as “Education”, “Business”, “Professions and positions”, “Professional products of activity” were highlighted. These subgroups contain the largest number of combinations with the key component “fashion” and are attributable to the scientific and technological progress, the complication of production processes, digitalisation, globalisation and other processes.

ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN PHRASEOLOGISMS OF WATER TRANSPORT DISCOURSE IN SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPARISON

The purpose of this research is to identify phraseological units of water transport discourse in English and Russian and to compare the sociolinguistic component of these groups of language units. The object of study is phraseological units that have lexemes in their composition, which are the names of water transport infrastructure (sea and river), as well as their parts, details, equipment, functions, people involved in the operation of water transport. The subject of the research is the common and different reasons for the emergence of English and Russian water transport idioms and the peculiarities of their use in English- and Russian-speaking societies. In the process of performing the work, general research methods of analysis and synthesis, elements of the quantitative method, procedures of sociolinguistic, linguocultural and comparative methods as methods of separate paradigms of linguistics, non-paradigmatic descriptive method were applied. In addition, linguistic methods of semantic, phraseological, and etymological analysis were applied. The result of the work is the identification of a number of water transport idioms that entered English and Russian phraseology at different times and in different ways, an attempt to typologize them and the definition of sociolinguistic features of the compared groups of English and Russian idioms. The main conclusions are that among the phraseological units of the water transport discourse, 7 groups are distinguished based on the assignment of key components to different lexical-semantic groups; the correlation of equivalent (28%), background (48%) and non-equivalent (14%) pairs of English and Russian phraseological units of water transport discourse was calculated; 11% of phraseological units of one language do not have phraseological equivalents in another language. A certain group of English idioms that originated in water transport have Russian counterparts that originated in other discourses. The main reason for the asymmetric state lies in the much longer history of the English fleet than the Russian one, in the much greater employment of the population of Great Britain and other English-speaking countries in water transport, as well as the long period of time when the English language, according to the decision of the IMO, has a communicative monopoly in international shipping.

DESCRIPTIONS AS A WAY OF EXPLICATING THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM OF AN IDIOM: A THEORETICAL ASPECT

The purpose of this article is the description and theoretical understanding of the description as a way of explicating the language system of the idiom, which consists in the scientific interpretation of language and speech units of idiom discourse, and thus, as a whole, gives the opportunity to increase the degree of evidence and reliability of linguistic observations of the lingual of the entire expressive resource of the idiom. The object is the concept of the description of the lingual as a language-speech system of linguistic analysis. The subject of the research is the theoretical and functional principles of description in the historical-linguistic aspect and the latest presentation of the description of the idiom as a language system. The result of the study is the substantiation of the appropriateness of revising the traditional theoretical qualification of description in linguistics, as well as, based on the experience of describing idiom discourse, its actualization in terms of identifying all potential possibilities of distributive description of the structure of the language, that is, the entire repertoire of linguistic elements (expressive resource of the lingual of the idiom) according to the contextual type of description. The proposed explication of the linguistic system of the idiom involves overcoming the incompleteness, non-systematic and incomparability of information of the monoidiom description and is focused on the maximum set of their relevant structural features, their systemic connections, etc. Conclusions: Description is one of the most common methods of description and study of facts, objects and phenomena of the linguistic picture of the world in linguistic scientific practice. The monoidiom description serves as a basis for further application in research of its methodology, research apparatus (metalanguage) and algorithm for describing a specific lingual as one of the techniques for building a description model for obtaining objective research results in linguistic science.

Intellectual, spiritual and material structural summit in the poetry of "My Heart" by Sami Awdal

The structure of the text proves its globalization in today’s literature, as its templates and linguistic cords fall into place. The present research revolves around sets of structures—a kind of structuralism—intellectual, spiritual and material structuralism that expands and deepens the scope of research. The intellectual structure at the moment of scrutiny falls into a circle of thought and closed discourse in which the philosophy revolves around each of the neutral ideas that reach the mind of the reader. And the horizons of the idea expand so that it is possible to reach the top of the structure from the prefix and the leading sentence to the last morpheme, from which the resonance of all the discourse units is created. The units struggle for the ability to coexist and the survival of the significance of ideas in that structure. The spiritual structuralism of a cognitive circle turns into a structure with hieroglyphs and imagery, in which the genius of the text writer appears in his choice of words and luminous ideas. Then the intellectual and spiritual cognitive discourse mix so that within a kind of carrier of the ideas of the heavenly text, we create a symbol from which is read national intellectual cognitive knowledge.